GLEN HANSARD (IRELAND)
THE RETURN OF THE IRISH SONGWRITER
AN IRISH SONGWRITER WITH THE PRIVILEGE OF BEING WHO HE WANTS TO BE.
Singer-songwriter, folk singer or melodic rocker, take your pick, either way he's an Irishman from Dublin, which betrays all the characteristics of a gently captivating and sometimes terrifying romantic poet with a vision that we all deserve each other and it doesn't matter what we're given, but what we do with it and how we choose to live accordingly. We just need someone to leave a little light in our path, as he sings about on his latest album All That Was East Is West Of Me Now. On it he reflects on the past and the present: he married the Finnish poet Maire Saaritsa, they had a son, and with older age came a different way of thinking: 'I'm very privileged to be who I am. I can play all over the world to people who are interested in hearing what I have to say, and still get paid for it."
That a world star is coming, you probably know that doesn't exactly mean anything with him, either, and those who remember him from past visits to Fokovki would bet on it. His beard and moustache may have turned pretty white, but otherwise he's still the same immediate guy, as we saw during Shane MacGowan's funeral last year when he and Irish singer Lisa O'Neill danced the church to Fairytale of New York and Glen later reminisced about his Irish friend: "He came up to me one day and said: 'Are you the one who murdered the Dubliners? And I said, 'Are you the idiot who murdered the Pogues?
Photo: Kamila Berndorffová, Mikolaj Ruthkowski (na profilu)
